Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Management Systems in the Developed and the Developing Countries : A Comparative Structural Study

The disposal, treatment, and recovery of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) are becoming a global environmental issue. These issues drive the developed and the developing countries to set up and improve the management systems for the waste. Previous authors have produced a sufficient number of study on WEEE management systems of the developed countries together with their success stories and of the developing countries with their existing problems, but only provide limited ones on how to compare the situations and the systems of these two regions. Hence, it is imperative to develop a comparative framework to distinguish the structures and the relationships within a particular WEEE management system of the developed and developing countries. This study proposes such framework which integrates a qualitative with quantitative approaches and incorporates the system thinking perspective. In particular, it comprises a series of research stages. Initially, a qualitative framework is developed to extract the characteristics of WEEE management systems in the developing countries from the scientific literature and then to compare them with the ones from the developed systems. Secondly, a System Dynamics approach is applied to assess the dynamical behaviors within the systems of the two regions. Thirdly, enhanced quantitative analysis, consist of Factorial Design with Analysis of Variance and then Policy Analysis, are conducted to further understand the determinants and interactions among the factors in the systems and to assess the impact of the selected policies on the systems’ behaviors. This study figures out the list of the determinants, the structural relationships, and the dynamics within the systems, characterizing and connecting the WEEE-specific problems in the developed and the developing countries. This study concludes the main findings and the policy recommendations for the future development and collaboration within and between the two regions.

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